a significant development from the American artists’ work.
The nature of that development is apparent in Lost to Sight.
As in Another Place, the canvas is divided into distinct zones.
On the left of the painting a dark column rises vertically
within a constricting channel. Like the related column shapes
in Another Place, this monolithic figure comprises a series of
thickly painted arcs, here enmeshed to form a single entity.
At its base there is a small, intimate, arched aperture. On
the right of the picture linear brushstrokes describe a doorlike opening containing inward-pointing shapes suggestive
of teeth or thorns. These two ‘figures’ confront each other
across a yawning expanse of black space.
In contemplating this image, as well as other recent paintings
by Beattie, the viewer senses the peculiar individual
character of each of these formal inventions. Some are
bold and aggressive, others seem passive and fragile, even
ghostly. Often these motifs appear intriguingly familiar:
doors, ladders and towers are implied. Other shapes are
more elusive, less recognisable. But always these elements
are so strongly defined, and their presence so convincingly
asserted, that the effect is that of protagonists enacting a
visual drama. It is this suggestion of an enigmatic underlying
narrative - alien to earlier exponents of painterly abstraction,
but potent in Beattie’s painting - which sets his work apart.
In this way Beattie’s art is founded on a paradox. Essentially
abstract, it nevertheless resonates with references to the
visible world. The key to this paradox is Beattie’s observation
that his art seeks to ‘give an emotional and psychological
weighting to formal strategies’. This aim, which realises
its fullest expression in the recent paintings, has been a
fundamental concern from the beginning of his work.
During the late 1960s, Beattie made a number of large-scale
paintings using paint poured and stained onto their surfaces.
The resulting images - huge, wall-like edifices of colour were not, however, abstractions from nature. Rather than
imitating the appearance of the natural world, these works
were entirely abstract images whose qualities of vast scale
and saturated colour formed an equivalent for similar
phenomena in nature. Significantly, at this relatively early
stage Beattie recognised in these paintings the capacity of
abstract forms to express intimate experiences of a emotional
and psychological kind.
56

This idea paved the way for Beattie’s subsequent realisation
that abstract shapes and marks could express complex
subjective experiences with greater potency if these formal
elements took on some of the characteristics of recognisable
objects. This notion is of fundamental importance in the
development of his art. His approach rests, in part, on the
theory that spontaneous, non-representative mark-making
directly expresses subjective experiences. The artist’s inner
life is encoded in the movement and substance of the paint.
In this respect his paintings are, as he has explained, ‘process
driven’. But, at the same time, Beattie’s art goes beyond
‘pure’ abstraction because it asserts that non-imitative
images can communicate these experiences to the viewer in
a more profound way when visual echoes of those images are
to be found in the real world.
To this end Beattie has evolved a rich vocabulary of formal
inventions - pictogram-like abstractions - which recur
throughout his paintings. The first of these, a ‘half-ziggurat’,
originated in Present Bound 1990. The ziggurat form relates to
the towers of ancient Babylon whose distinctive architectural
shape comprised staged blocks rising to a point, each storey
smaller than the one below it. This motif carries intense
personal significance for Beattie. In his paintings it takes the
form of individual cell-like shapes, painted broadly and in a
raw, spontaneous manner, piled up in an isosceles triangle
configuration. It was the central motif of the Witness series
which occupied Beattie in the early 1990s and it reappears
in Two of a Kind 1995, exhibited here. The image is a relic of
Beattie’s earlier way of working, during the mid-1980s, when
he compartmentalised the entire surface of his paintings
into separate cells. Each of these cells contained individual
ideographic shapes. Subsequently, Beattie broke down this
all-over composition, preserving a few cell-shapes, which reformed themselves as a single figure.
The half-ziggurat is a key example of Beattie’s ability to invest
an abstract, formal device with physical and psychological
presence. Typically it sits on the bottom edge of the picture
space, an isolated figure within the surrounding space.
Charged with anthropomorphic implications, the halfziggurat becomes a poignant expression of solitude. In Two
of a Kind the half-ziggurat is presented within a darkened,
somewhat sombre space. This is also occupied by a smaller